First work anniversary

22 Jun 2015

This June, I completed my first year at OSIsoft and it’s been a remarkable experience so far. For the past one year, I was not contributing much on my blog rkandhal.com. However, I was working on learning JavaScript, which I now believe is a pretty good language and would be the primary focus of this blog.

It’s time to step back and look what all accomplished in past one year:

1. School: before May 2014
   JS was the new buzzword in software community. HackerNews had atleast one new JavaScript library trending each day. I had used jQuery, JavaScript in work projects but with an objective of ‘making things work’. After finishing up my masters degree, it was time to choose next endeavor. PPT (People, Product, and Technology stack) were the criterias I used.

2. Welcome OSI: Jun - Jul
   Joined OSIsoft as it fits perfectly in my criterias. Learnt about real time or time-series data and amazed by its application. Also, understood the practical limitations of relational or noSQL databases. I took training for PI System: industry standard for organization’s asset management and business intelligence. It was/is pretty awesome to visualize real-time data flowing from a boiler (somewhere in a plant) to a process engineer’s mobile.

3. PI Coresight: Aug - Present
   Started contributing to PI Coresight team which is the primary data visualization tool in PI product suite. Powered by latest technology and some really smart people. It’s both interesting and challenging work.

###Non-technical stuff Some of the soft-skills acquired in last year. I can’t comment whether they’re good or bad.

1.Keep Shipping: Earlier I used to lean towards DRIFT (Do it RIght First Time), but I think YAGNI “You Aren’t Gonna Need It” strategy works well these days specially in agile teams. Instead of over engineering a feature, strive for shipping it out of the door with considerable good code (maybe not perfect).

“Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world. Not shipping on behalf of your goal of changing the world is often a symptom of the resistance. Call its bluff, ship always, and then change the world.” - Seth Godin

2.Trivial but Significant: Test cases are your best friends (and so are keyboard shortcuts), whenever in trouble use whiteboard, there will always be choices (think, choose and keep moving), Lines of Code is inversely proportional to feature quality (and so is the word count on a blog post).